This week, Symfony organized a Virtual Hack Day to bring in new contributors to the Symfony Community. This was also the opportunity to give a push to the pending issues and pull requests, because the upcoming Symfony 3.1 version will achieve the "feature freeze" status at the end of this month. Meanwhile, the SymfonyLive Paris 2016 conference announced its full program.

Symfony 2.8 introduces twelve small and decoupled polyfill components to "fill the gaps" of PHP 5.x versions and missing extensions. Now your applications can safely use PHP features and functions available in any PHP version.

The VarDumper component provides mechanisms for walking through any arbitrary PHP variable and a replacement for PHP's var_dump(). Symfony 2.8 added new casters to VarDumper, which are responsible to format the dumped information accordingly to their types.

The upcoming Symfony 3.1 version will introduce lots of new and useful features for the Yaml component. But before enjoying those features, in Symfony 2.8 we needed to deprecate some features to make Yaml files comply with the Yaml specification.